CSI--Living Dead Girl (2 of 4)
Mar. 31st, 2007 06:12 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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csi_fictionTitle: Living Dead Girl
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kosmickway
Category: CSI Vegas; character back-story; romance; episode-related
Rating: R for violence, drug use, and sexuality.
Pairing: GSR
Complete or WiP: Complete
Author’s Note: This is my interpretation of Sara’s back story. It is by no means definitive. In writing this I attempted to shed some light on Sara’s father’s murder (see “Nesting Dolls,” fifth season, for the complete story). This fic takes place immediately after the fifth season episode “Committed” and focuses on the after-effects of Adam Trent’s attack on Sara during that episode.
Disclaimer: I don’t own them. I make no profit from them. I just worship at the altar of Zuiker and Mendelsohn. All songs are property of Rob Zombie.
Crawl on me, sink into me, die for me, living dead girl.” Rob Zombie, “Living Dead Girl.”
“Miss Sidle, will you please describe the events of the night of March 18th as they relate to your interaction with Adam Trent at Desert State Hospital?”
In her best scientific manner she described it– the portion of the investigation that lead her to suspect that Nurse McKay had played a part in Robbie Garson’s murder, the search of the nurse’s station, the fact that Grissom left to find a guard with keys to the file cabinets.
She talked about Adam’s comments to her,
Do you believe everything happens for a reason? That bad things are there to teach us some karmic lesson?
about her attempt to inject him with a syringe of tranquilizer. How he had seized her around the neck and forced her to the ground,
Maybe I’m just vibrating at the wrong frequency!
pressing a shard of needle-sharp dried clay from the art therapy room into her neck.
Don’t you move a muscle! I will grind you, you bitch, do you hear me?
Sara described Grissom’s appearance at the window,
Open the door. Please, just open the door.
how he stared at her through the glass as she’d struggled to get out of Trent’s iron grip,
Do not look at them, you keep your eyes on the floor!
how McKay appeared in the window to talk her son down,
No, you go away, you stay out, you bitch!
and how she’d been able to elbow her way out of his grasp and break for the door.
Giving the necessary descriptions and details to the lawyers brought up the memory of everything that had happened after she sprinted into the hallway, her skin crawling from her contact with Adam Trent.
Sara leaned on the window, heart pounding. There was a bit of cool, rainy air wafting inside from a crack in the double-paned glass and she leaned down to catch the draft.
Hurried footsteps came up behind her. She could see Grissom’s reflection in the window, cut into diamonds by the wire mesh. He was waiting for her, wanting some acknowledgment that she was okay, acknowledgment she couldn’t give him yet.
“Let me see,” he said quietly, taking one step forward.
His fingers brushed her neck where the clay shard had been pressed, noting the small cut, the red rawness of her fair skin. It would bruise the next day, Sara knew, and she planned on wearing a scarf to avoid the questions that would follow.
She shuddered when Grissom touched her, unable to say whether it was from fear or pleasure. Her breath rushed out in a gasp. Grissom studied her, his eyes troubled.
“You need–“ he started, and then corrected himself. “I need to sit down.”
He slid down the wall into a crouch and she followed him, grateful that he’d suggested it before her own legs gave out.
Recalling it all was chipping away at her self control, rocking her to the core of her being. She hid her shaking hands underneath the table or kept them busy playing with a pen or a coffee cup.
Don’t you move a muscle! I will grind you, you bitch, do you hear me?
Grissom, staring at her, his eyes wide and alarmed.
Open the door. Please, just open the door.
How he’d kept his eyes on hers no matter how much he must have wanted to look away.
Do not look at them, you keep your eyes on the floor!
How her eyes kept moving back to his face, a life line in those desperate moments when she wanted to shrink into a ball and scream.
Do you believe everything happens for a reason? That bad things are there to teach us some karmic lesson?
If it was so then she and Adam Trent had something in common after all. They must have been paying for some awful sin to have mothers like theirs, women who killed their husbands and committed incest.
What sin had she, Sara, been paying for so many years later, to end up on the floor of the nurse’s station at Desert State Mental Hospital, crushed in the arms of a lunatic, her panicked eyes fixed on Gil Grissom’s as he stared at her through a locked door?
“I need to take a quick break,” Sara said as calmly as she could, heart hammering in her ears. “I think I’d like to get some air.”
***
She walked out of the conference room, head high, then broke into a stumbling half-run when the door closed behind her, racing for the outside. As she burst through the door, the Nevada air broke over her in waves, cool and dry, and she bent forward, sucking in great lung fulls.
She sank onto the pavement, shivering, her back to the rough stone, gulping air even though it was choking her. She couldn’t cry. She rocked instead, her fingers frenetically plucking the legs of her pants.
Grissom pulled into the parking lot then and saw her sitting there, rocking. He was out of the Tahoe in an instant and striding toward her, then on his knees in front of her.
“Are you okay? What happened?” His hands took hold of her arms and he shook her gently. “Sara.”
Understanding came and he put a hand on her back and rubbed slowly in circles. “Sara, breathe. Don’t hyperventilate.”
He watched her face as he talked, taking a measure of her emotions until they reached a state they could both handle.
“Deep slow breaths.”
He took the hand that was nervously pulling at her pants leg and closed it in his own.
“Calm down.”
He steadied her. Just seeing him helped her control the panic and fear. She fought to steady the hitch in her breathing and slow her racing heart, concentrating on the motion of his hands on her back. Bit by bit she came down from the panicked place, methodically regaining control of each of her faculties until she could look up into his impassive face and say, truthfully, “I’m okay.”
“Glad to hear it. Now sit still for a minute.”
They sat, quiet, feeling the wind, the electric hum of the air before a coming storm. Finally Grissom said, “All this from talking about it?”
Sara repeated what she’d told him that night in the hospital: “Crazy people make me feel crazy.”
“You’re not crazy,” Grissom responded.
“Sometimes I wonder.” Sara stared at the traffic moving by on the Strip below them.
“If I’d known it would be like this for you–“
”You couldn’t know. Hell, I didn’t know. I have no idea what goes on in here these days.” She tapped her temple. “It’s a lot easier thinking you’re crazy than it is to think that you’re out of control.”
“Why is that?”
“If you’re crazy– certifiably, looney-tunes, Mad Hatter crazy, like those guys at Desert State– you have an excuse for acting a certain way. You’re deviant, you’re chemically imbalanced, you’re crazy. If you happen to be like me– a loose cannon with a gun– you’re just out of control and you have no excuse. You’re the one who let it slip in the first place.”
Grissom stared at her long enough to make her feel uncomfortable.
“Now that is interesting,” he said.
Sara shrugged, blushed. “Not really.”
“It’s interesting to me. Suddenly a lot of puzzle pieces just clicked into place.”
Sara shifted position and leaned back against the wall.
“My foster family and social worker put me in counseling, to talk about what happened with my parents. I remember this one flaky guy, a real crystals and rainbows New Age-er. He told me I had no right to be mad at my mother for what she’d done to my dad, that she was crazy and that just couldn’t be helped. She didn’t know what she was doing when she seduced him into her bed to get him to change his mind about the divorce and then stabbed him in the chest 30 times. She was out of her mind and that somehow made it excusable.” She smirked, thinking about it. “I kicked a hole in his wall.”
“He was wrong to tell you that after what you’d been through.”
Sara shook her head. “It put things in perspective. The world looks at craziness a certain way– it helped me define where I stand.” She took a deep, shaky breath. “I need to go back in there.”
He peered at her, inspecting. “Do you want me to come with you?”
“No. Thanks but no. I need to do this myself.”
“Come by my place later. We’ll have dinner.”
Sara stared at him, the invitation taking her completely by surprise. “Really?”
Grissom looked amused. “I wouldn’t have said it if I didn’t mean it.”
“It’s just that–“ She cut herself off before she could say anything she might regret. “Okay. Dinner. Can I, um, bring anything? Wine or dessert or–“
”Just yourself. I’ll have everything we need.”
They rose to their feet. Sara glanced at the building, mentally steeling herself.
She was surprised when she felt Grissom’s hand rise to the back of her neck, under her hair, and squeeze, rubbing the tense muscles with sure, strong fingers.
Sara froze, deer in the headlights for a startled second, then gave herself over to the delicious feeling of Grissom’s hands working her neck, easing the tension out of her bit by bit. Her head fell back and she clamped down on the urge to groan softly, knowing it would turn a kind gesture into something more intimate than either of them were willing to face.
Then his hand fell away and he was giving her a small, knowing smile when she turned around to meet his eyes.
“What was that for?”
“It got your mind off the hearing, didn’t it?”
Sara stared at him, not sure whether to be grateful for the distraction or angry that he’d used her feelings for him against her. Shaking her head, she finally said, “I was wrong. You’re the person who makes me feel crazy.”
Grissom smirked and tipped an imaginary hat. “My work here is finished. See you at my place later.”
And he walked back toward the Tahoe.
***
When she arrived at Grissom’s apartment night was starting to creep in on tiptoe. Wrung out by the long question and answer session with lawyers for both sides, Sara hoped dinner with Grissom would be a pleasant diversion instead of the emotional ordeal it could easily become.
Grissom answered the door in his usual black pants and black t-shirt combo. He was holding a glass of wine in one hand, which he passed to her as soon as she stepped inside.
“You read my mind,” she said with a smile. “Thank you.”
“I figured you might want it after your afternoon. But--,” he said, raising a finger in caution, “–You’re limited to a glass an hour if you plan on driving home.”
Sara nodded, the reference to her drinking problem noted and filed away. She took a sip of the wine and walked around his living room as he returned to the kitchen to continue cooking.
The most distinguishing characteristic of his apartment was the butterfly wall. Several Lucite display cases were filled with butterflies of every size and color imaginable, from the size of the palm of a grown man’s hand to the size of Sara’s pinkie fingernail.
Given Grissom’s love for insects, Sara was always surprised that butterflies were the only insect that he displayed in his apartment. Her first time here, she’d expected to find cockroaches and spiders on display boards and in terrariums. Instead it was the rainbow array of butterflies and a few framed prints that graced the walls, no terrariums in sight, no creepy-crawly insect photographs on display.
Sara peered into one of the display cases and found a blue butterfly with distinct purple and white stripes on its wings. She admired its vivid colors as she sipped her wine.
“He’s a blue morpho butterfly,” Grissom said from behind her. “I got him from Brazil. He’s one of the most beautiful blues I’ve ever seen.”
“He’s stunning,” Sara murmured. She looked around in the case. “Do you have a monarch butterfly?”
“Right here.” Grissom located the vivid orange and yellow wings and pointed it out to her. “Do you like monarchs?”
“One of the only nice memories I have of my parents was the day we went to Pacific Grove to see the monarchs at their wintering site. I was about seven years old, insatiably curious. I was always asking my parents questions that they really couldn’t answer– and not just “why is the sky blue?” questions but really hard ones like “why do cats have tails?” and “how do cows make milk?”
“I asked my mother how butterflies flew. Since she didn’t have a clue about air currents or the dynamics of flight, she made up the answer any seven-year-old girl would want to hear– she said they had magic dust on their wings. She said if I was a very good girl a butterfly might land on me and then I could fly, too.”
Sara walked over to the window and stared down at the city. She watched Grissom’s reflection as he crossed the room to turn off the stove before moving back within hearing range.
“I stood in the park with stalks of flower blossoms in both hands. Finally this gorgeous monarch landed on my arm and started sipping from the blossoms I was holding. I stroked her wing and when I looked down at my fingers, there was a fine orange powder– my mother’s ‘magic butterfly dust.’”
Sara sipped her wine and laid her forehead on the cool window. “I touched her wings as she drank from those flowers. I stroked those wings for what felt like forever. But when I went to toss her back into the air, she couldn’t fly. She fell to the grass. No matter how often I tried picking her up and tossing her in the air or setting her on a flower, she couldn’t flap her wings. My parents found me crying by the oleander bushes and thought I was upset because I couldn’t fly.
“When we got home a few days later I read up on butterflies at the library. I found out that the magic dust was actually scales that helped her fly. I’d crippled her without even knowing it.”
“Butterflies,” Grissom said, “are some of the hardiest insects out there. They start life as one thing and metamorphose into another. They go from living on the land to living fully in the air, from having a set of legs to a set of wings, from eating leaves to sipping flower nectar. They’re some of the most highly adaptive insects because they’re used to change.”
Sara shook her head, amused. “Leave it to a scientist to miss the forest for all the trees.”
Grissom stared at her, perplexed. “I’m sorry?”
“You forgot the most important thing about butterflies.”
“Which is?”
“They’re beautiful.”
“Of course they are. But that’s not the point.”
Sara gently laid a hand on his cheek. “Gris, when a little girl wants to be a butterfly more than anything else in the world, she’s not thinking about how hardy and adaptive it is. She only sees that it’s beautiful. That’s the point.”
***
“There’s only one sure way to bring the giant down–defunct the strings of cemetery things with one flat foot on the devil’s wing.” Rob Zombie, “Living Dead Girl”
Sara spent that Friday at school hardly daring to believe that her father would come back for her. Though he’d promised to take her out someplace very special when he’d dropped her off that morning, she didn’t get her hopes up. Sara lived comfortably alongside disappointment. It was as much a part of her existence as breathing.
So when Timothy Sidle’s sporty red convertible pulled up alongside the bus circle that afternoon, Sara felt her heart leap with joy and pride. Her father was so handsome in his suit and he was smiling at her as if she were the only person in the universe. And though Sara professed not to care at all about what was “cool” or “in”, she felt very cool indeed walking toward her father’s car, which was blasting excellent music from its equally excellent sound system.
Shouldering her backpack, she walked with a slight swagger, savoring the whispers of the other girls in the class. None of them, she knew, had a father quite like hers.
“Hey, Peaches,” Timothy greeted her. “Ready to go have some fun?”
Sara grinned at her father, the first smile that she’d meant in a very long time. “Yeah, Dad. Let’s go.”
He took her to the mall, a place Sara had never had occasion to visit. He replaced the clothes that she had outgrown or were too shabby to wear with brand new ones, grandly allowing her to pick whatever she wanted. He replaced the outgrown shoes with pinching toes with a pair of brand new cross-trainers. He insisted that she have a real haircut in a salon that smelled of shampoo and hair spray and even sat alongside her in another chair, having his own trim and a shave. He let her run wild in the bookstore, buying her a thick stack of novels, and ended the evening by taking her out to a Mexican restaurant, where they shared enchiladas and fried ice cream.
“Are you having fun?” he kept asking her. “Is there anything else you want?”
Was she having fun? It was like a dream, the sort of thing that happened in the fantasy novels she loved to read. A whimsical portion of Sara’s logical brain was having a lot of fun with the notion that she, too, was one of the legions of storybook princesses who, after a life of hardship, was finally being treated as she deserved.
The other part of her knew that it was silly to be so impressed. This was the sort of thing that “real” families did all the time– a Friday night at the mall with parents indulging their children. But for the first time in her teenage life, it was happening to her. She wasn’t spending the evening avoiding her mother and her coke-fueled rages. She was being doted on by her father, the closest she had yet come to a handsome prince.
“Peaches, I’m going to ask your mother for a divorce,” he said on the way back to his apartment.
She nodded. Not a shocker. It didn’t matter to her one way or another, really, if her parents got divorced. Not the way it mattered to some of the girls at school. For them, divorce was a tragedy, a shattering of their old lives. It meant break-downs in class, sessions with the school counselor, teachers who would take it easy on you for a few days because you were “going through a rough time.” For some of these girls, she supposed, divorce was a terrible thing. But they had mothers and fathers who spent time with their kids and took them out to eat and to the park, like a normal family. They didn’t have a father who was always out of town or a mother who was always high, who beat each other senseless when they battled. The girls at school had a family– Sara had never had one of those.
“What I need to know– that is, what I’d like to know is if you want to come live with me. I can’t make any promises, Peaches, and I can’t guarantee that things will be easy for you with me being away so often but at least you wouldn’t have to be around the kind of craziness your mother is in to right now.”
Sara felt a smile stretch warm across her face. No more smoke and razor blades, no more men and their awful hands?
“Do you really mean it?”
“Of course I do. You’re my daughter, Sara. I love you. I don’t want you to be any place you don’t want to be.”
“All the girls at school whose parents got divorced only see their fathers on the weekends. They all have to live with their mothers. Will it be the same for me?”
“I don’t think so, baby. Considering your mother’s lifestyle, I think we can safely say that you won’t have to live with her much longer at all. I’ve already got the papers drawn up. I’ll go see her tomorrow.”
END PART 2
Author:
kosmickwayCategory: CSI Vegas; character back-story; romance; episode-related
Rating: R for violence, drug use, and sexuality.
Pairing: GSR
Complete or WiP: Complete
Author’s Note: This is my interpretation of Sara’s back story. It is by no means definitive. In writing this I attempted to shed some light on Sara’s father’s murder (see “Nesting Dolls,” fifth season, for the complete story). This fic takes place immediately after the fifth season episode “Committed” and focuses on the after-effects of Adam Trent’s attack on Sara during that episode.
Disclaimer: I don’t own them. I make no profit from them. I just worship at the altar of Zuiker and Mendelsohn. All songs are property of Rob Zombie.
Crawl on me, sink into me, die for me, living dead girl.” Rob Zombie, “Living Dead Girl.”
“Miss Sidle, will you please describe the events of the night of March 18th as they relate to your interaction with Adam Trent at Desert State Hospital?”
In her best scientific manner she described it– the portion of the investigation that lead her to suspect that Nurse McKay had played a part in Robbie Garson’s murder, the search of the nurse’s station, the fact that Grissom left to find a guard with keys to the file cabinets.
She talked about Adam’s comments to her,
Do you believe everything happens for a reason? That bad things are there to teach us some karmic lesson?
about her attempt to inject him with a syringe of tranquilizer. How he had seized her around the neck and forced her to the ground,
Maybe I’m just vibrating at the wrong frequency!
pressing a shard of needle-sharp dried clay from the art therapy room into her neck.
Don’t you move a muscle! I will grind you, you bitch, do you hear me?
Sara described Grissom’s appearance at the window,
Open the door. Please, just open the door.
how he stared at her through the glass as she’d struggled to get out of Trent’s iron grip,
Do not look at them, you keep your eyes on the floor!
how McKay appeared in the window to talk her son down,
No, you go away, you stay out, you bitch!
and how she’d been able to elbow her way out of his grasp and break for the door.
Giving the necessary descriptions and details to the lawyers brought up the memory of everything that had happened after she sprinted into the hallway, her skin crawling from her contact with Adam Trent.
Sara leaned on the window, heart pounding. There was a bit of cool, rainy air wafting inside from a crack in the double-paned glass and she leaned down to catch the draft.
Hurried footsteps came up behind her. She could see Grissom’s reflection in the window, cut into diamonds by the wire mesh. He was waiting for her, wanting some acknowledgment that she was okay, acknowledgment she couldn’t give him yet.
“Let me see,” he said quietly, taking one step forward.
His fingers brushed her neck where the clay shard had been pressed, noting the small cut, the red rawness of her fair skin. It would bruise the next day, Sara knew, and she planned on wearing a scarf to avoid the questions that would follow.
She shuddered when Grissom touched her, unable to say whether it was from fear or pleasure. Her breath rushed out in a gasp. Grissom studied her, his eyes troubled.
“You need–“ he started, and then corrected himself. “I need to sit down.”
He slid down the wall into a crouch and she followed him, grateful that he’d suggested it before her own legs gave out.
Recalling it all was chipping away at her self control, rocking her to the core of her being. She hid her shaking hands underneath the table or kept them busy playing with a pen or a coffee cup.
Don’t you move a muscle! I will grind you, you bitch, do you hear me?
Grissom, staring at her, his eyes wide and alarmed.
Open the door. Please, just open the door.
How he’d kept his eyes on hers no matter how much he must have wanted to look away.
Do not look at them, you keep your eyes on the floor!
How her eyes kept moving back to his face, a life line in those desperate moments when she wanted to shrink into a ball and scream.
Do you believe everything happens for a reason? That bad things are there to teach us some karmic lesson?
If it was so then she and Adam Trent had something in common after all. They must have been paying for some awful sin to have mothers like theirs, women who killed their husbands and committed incest.
What sin had she, Sara, been paying for so many years later, to end up on the floor of the nurse’s station at Desert State Mental Hospital, crushed in the arms of a lunatic, her panicked eyes fixed on Gil Grissom’s as he stared at her through a locked door?
“I need to take a quick break,” Sara said as calmly as she could, heart hammering in her ears. “I think I’d like to get some air.”
***
She walked out of the conference room, head high, then broke into a stumbling half-run when the door closed behind her, racing for the outside. As she burst through the door, the Nevada air broke over her in waves, cool and dry, and she bent forward, sucking in great lung fulls.
She sank onto the pavement, shivering, her back to the rough stone, gulping air even though it was choking her. She couldn’t cry. She rocked instead, her fingers frenetically plucking the legs of her pants.
Grissom pulled into the parking lot then and saw her sitting there, rocking. He was out of the Tahoe in an instant and striding toward her, then on his knees in front of her.
“Are you okay? What happened?” His hands took hold of her arms and he shook her gently. “Sara.”
Understanding came and he put a hand on her back and rubbed slowly in circles. “Sara, breathe. Don’t hyperventilate.”
He watched her face as he talked, taking a measure of her emotions until they reached a state they could both handle.
“Deep slow breaths.”
He took the hand that was nervously pulling at her pants leg and closed it in his own.
“Calm down.”
He steadied her. Just seeing him helped her control the panic and fear. She fought to steady the hitch in her breathing and slow her racing heart, concentrating on the motion of his hands on her back. Bit by bit she came down from the panicked place, methodically regaining control of each of her faculties until she could look up into his impassive face and say, truthfully, “I’m okay.”
“Glad to hear it. Now sit still for a minute.”
They sat, quiet, feeling the wind, the electric hum of the air before a coming storm. Finally Grissom said, “All this from talking about it?”
Sara repeated what she’d told him that night in the hospital: “Crazy people make me feel crazy.”
“You’re not crazy,” Grissom responded.
“Sometimes I wonder.” Sara stared at the traffic moving by on the Strip below them.
“If I’d known it would be like this for you–“
”You couldn’t know. Hell, I didn’t know. I have no idea what goes on in here these days.” She tapped her temple. “It’s a lot easier thinking you’re crazy than it is to think that you’re out of control.”
“Why is that?”
“If you’re crazy– certifiably, looney-tunes, Mad Hatter crazy, like those guys at Desert State– you have an excuse for acting a certain way. You’re deviant, you’re chemically imbalanced, you’re crazy. If you happen to be like me– a loose cannon with a gun– you’re just out of control and you have no excuse. You’re the one who let it slip in the first place.”
Grissom stared at her long enough to make her feel uncomfortable.
“Now that is interesting,” he said.
Sara shrugged, blushed. “Not really.”
“It’s interesting to me. Suddenly a lot of puzzle pieces just clicked into place.”
Sara shifted position and leaned back against the wall.
“My foster family and social worker put me in counseling, to talk about what happened with my parents. I remember this one flaky guy, a real crystals and rainbows New Age-er. He told me I had no right to be mad at my mother for what she’d done to my dad, that she was crazy and that just couldn’t be helped. She didn’t know what she was doing when she seduced him into her bed to get him to change his mind about the divorce and then stabbed him in the chest 30 times. She was out of her mind and that somehow made it excusable.” She smirked, thinking about it. “I kicked a hole in his wall.”
“He was wrong to tell you that after what you’d been through.”
Sara shook her head. “It put things in perspective. The world looks at craziness a certain way– it helped me define where I stand.” She took a deep, shaky breath. “I need to go back in there.”
He peered at her, inspecting. “Do you want me to come with you?”
“No. Thanks but no. I need to do this myself.”
“Come by my place later. We’ll have dinner.”
Sara stared at him, the invitation taking her completely by surprise. “Really?”
Grissom looked amused. “I wouldn’t have said it if I didn’t mean it.”
“It’s just that–“ She cut herself off before she could say anything she might regret. “Okay. Dinner. Can I, um, bring anything? Wine or dessert or–“
”Just yourself. I’ll have everything we need.”
They rose to their feet. Sara glanced at the building, mentally steeling herself.
She was surprised when she felt Grissom’s hand rise to the back of her neck, under her hair, and squeeze, rubbing the tense muscles with sure, strong fingers.
Sara froze, deer in the headlights for a startled second, then gave herself over to the delicious feeling of Grissom’s hands working her neck, easing the tension out of her bit by bit. Her head fell back and she clamped down on the urge to groan softly, knowing it would turn a kind gesture into something more intimate than either of them were willing to face.
Then his hand fell away and he was giving her a small, knowing smile when she turned around to meet his eyes.
“What was that for?”
“It got your mind off the hearing, didn’t it?”
Sara stared at him, not sure whether to be grateful for the distraction or angry that he’d used her feelings for him against her. Shaking her head, she finally said, “I was wrong. You’re the person who makes me feel crazy.”
Grissom smirked and tipped an imaginary hat. “My work here is finished. See you at my place later.”
And he walked back toward the Tahoe.
***
When she arrived at Grissom’s apartment night was starting to creep in on tiptoe. Wrung out by the long question and answer session with lawyers for both sides, Sara hoped dinner with Grissom would be a pleasant diversion instead of the emotional ordeal it could easily become.
Grissom answered the door in his usual black pants and black t-shirt combo. He was holding a glass of wine in one hand, which he passed to her as soon as she stepped inside.
“You read my mind,” she said with a smile. “Thank you.”
“I figured you might want it after your afternoon. But--,” he said, raising a finger in caution, “–You’re limited to a glass an hour if you plan on driving home.”
Sara nodded, the reference to her drinking problem noted and filed away. She took a sip of the wine and walked around his living room as he returned to the kitchen to continue cooking.
The most distinguishing characteristic of his apartment was the butterfly wall. Several Lucite display cases were filled with butterflies of every size and color imaginable, from the size of the palm of a grown man’s hand to the size of Sara’s pinkie fingernail.
Given Grissom’s love for insects, Sara was always surprised that butterflies were the only insect that he displayed in his apartment. Her first time here, she’d expected to find cockroaches and spiders on display boards and in terrariums. Instead it was the rainbow array of butterflies and a few framed prints that graced the walls, no terrariums in sight, no creepy-crawly insect photographs on display.
Sara peered into one of the display cases and found a blue butterfly with distinct purple and white stripes on its wings. She admired its vivid colors as she sipped her wine.
“He’s a blue morpho butterfly,” Grissom said from behind her. “I got him from Brazil. He’s one of the most beautiful blues I’ve ever seen.”
“He’s stunning,” Sara murmured. She looked around in the case. “Do you have a monarch butterfly?”
“Right here.” Grissom located the vivid orange and yellow wings and pointed it out to her. “Do you like monarchs?”
“One of the only nice memories I have of my parents was the day we went to Pacific Grove to see the monarchs at their wintering site. I was about seven years old, insatiably curious. I was always asking my parents questions that they really couldn’t answer– and not just “why is the sky blue?” questions but really hard ones like “why do cats have tails?” and “how do cows make milk?”
“I asked my mother how butterflies flew. Since she didn’t have a clue about air currents or the dynamics of flight, she made up the answer any seven-year-old girl would want to hear– she said they had magic dust on their wings. She said if I was a very good girl a butterfly might land on me and then I could fly, too.”
Sara walked over to the window and stared down at the city. She watched Grissom’s reflection as he crossed the room to turn off the stove before moving back within hearing range.
“I stood in the park with stalks of flower blossoms in both hands. Finally this gorgeous monarch landed on my arm and started sipping from the blossoms I was holding. I stroked her wing and when I looked down at my fingers, there was a fine orange powder– my mother’s ‘magic butterfly dust.’”
Sara sipped her wine and laid her forehead on the cool window. “I touched her wings as she drank from those flowers. I stroked those wings for what felt like forever. But when I went to toss her back into the air, she couldn’t fly. She fell to the grass. No matter how often I tried picking her up and tossing her in the air or setting her on a flower, she couldn’t flap her wings. My parents found me crying by the oleander bushes and thought I was upset because I couldn’t fly.
“When we got home a few days later I read up on butterflies at the library. I found out that the magic dust was actually scales that helped her fly. I’d crippled her without even knowing it.”
“Butterflies,” Grissom said, “are some of the hardiest insects out there. They start life as one thing and metamorphose into another. They go from living on the land to living fully in the air, from having a set of legs to a set of wings, from eating leaves to sipping flower nectar. They’re some of the most highly adaptive insects because they’re used to change.”
Sara shook her head, amused. “Leave it to a scientist to miss the forest for all the trees.”
Grissom stared at her, perplexed. “I’m sorry?”
“You forgot the most important thing about butterflies.”
“Which is?”
“They’re beautiful.”
“Of course they are. But that’s not the point.”
Sara gently laid a hand on his cheek. “Gris, when a little girl wants to be a butterfly more than anything else in the world, she’s not thinking about how hardy and adaptive it is. She only sees that it’s beautiful. That’s the point.”
***
“There’s only one sure way to bring the giant down–defunct the strings of cemetery things with one flat foot on the devil’s wing.” Rob Zombie, “Living Dead Girl”
Sara spent that Friday at school hardly daring to believe that her father would come back for her. Though he’d promised to take her out someplace very special when he’d dropped her off that morning, she didn’t get her hopes up. Sara lived comfortably alongside disappointment. It was as much a part of her existence as breathing.
So when Timothy Sidle’s sporty red convertible pulled up alongside the bus circle that afternoon, Sara felt her heart leap with joy and pride. Her father was so handsome in his suit and he was smiling at her as if she were the only person in the universe. And though Sara professed not to care at all about what was “cool” or “in”, she felt very cool indeed walking toward her father’s car, which was blasting excellent music from its equally excellent sound system.
Shouldering her backpack, she walked with a slight swagger, savoring the whispers of the other girls in the class. None of them, she knew, had a father quite like hers.
“Hey, Peaches,” Timothy greeted her. “Ready to go have some fun?”
Sara grinned at her father, the first smile that she’d meant in a very long time. “Yeah, Dad. Let’s go.”
He took her to the mall, a place Sara had never had occasion to visit. He replaced the clothes that she had outgrown or were too shabby to wear with brand new ones, grandly allowing her to pick whatever she wanted. He replaced the outgrown shoes with pinching toes with a pair of brand new cross-trainers. He insisted that she have a real haircut in a salon that smelled of shampoo and hair spray and even sat alongside her in another chair, having his own trim and a shave. He let her run wild in the bookstore, buying her a thick stack of novels, and ended the evening by taking her out to a Mexican restaurant, where they shared enchiladas and fried ice cream.
“Are you having fun?” he kept asking her. “Is there anything else you want?”
Was she having fun? It was like a dream, the sort of thing that happened in the fantasy novels she loved to read. A whimsical portion of Sara’s logical brain was having a lot of fun with the notion that she, too, was one of the legions of storybook princesses who, after a life of hardship, was finally being treated as she deserved.
The other part of her knew that it was silly to be so impressed. This was the sort of thing that “real” families did all the time– a Friday night at the mall with parents indulging their children. But for the first time in her teenage life, it was happening to her. She wasn’t spending the evening avoiding her mother and her coke-fueled rages. She was being doted on by her father, the closest she had yet come to a handsome prince.
“Peaches, I’m going to ask your mother for a divorce,” he said on the way back to his apartment.
She nodded. Not a shocker. It didn’t matter to her one way or another, really, if her parents got divorced. Not the way it mattered to some of the girls at school. For them, divorce was a tragedy, a shattering of their old lives. It meant break-downs in class, sessions with the school counselor, teachers who would take it easy on you for a few days because you were “going through a rough time.” For some of these girls, she supposed, divorce was a terrible thing. But they had mothers and fathers who spent time with their kids and took them out to eat and to the park, like a normal family. They didn’t have a father who was always out of town or a mother who was always high, who beat each other senseless when they battled. The girls at school had a family– Sara had never had one of those.
“What I need to know– that is, what I’d like to know is if you want to come live with me. I can’t make any promises, Peaches, and I can’t guarantee that things will be easy for you with me being away so often but at least you wouldn’t have to be around the kind of craziness your mother is in to right now.”
Sara felt a smile stretch warm across her face. No more smoke and razor blades, no more men and their awful hands?
“Do you really mean it?”
“Of course I do. You’re my daughter, Sara. I love you. I don’t want you to be any place you don’t want to be.”
“All the girls at school whose parents got divorced only see their fathers on the weekends. They all have to live with their mothers. Will it be the same for me?”
“I don’t think so, baby. Considering your mother’s lifestyle, I think we can safely say that you won’t have to live with her much longer at all. I’ve already got the papers drawn up. I’ll go see her tomorrow.”
END PART 2
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